Amico, Michael

My main focus is in understanding how emotion is central to bringing people together into relationships and larger social formations. Many neuroscientists and psychologists have also been interested in how emotion is central to the processes of making sense of the world at the level of human consciousness. My most recent work shows how names nothing but the deadlock between, on one side, bodily sensation and, on the other side, meaning. This deadlock is experienced as a constant switching between the two ‘sides’ of sensation and meaning. This switching is the process of making sense that has been most robustly studied by history (as opposed to any of the biological sciences). I would argue that emotions (along with other, general concepts) are the means by which we manage the ineradicable experience of this deadlock at the level of social relationships. Once you take this symbolic parallax into account, it is impossible to nuance your understanding of emotions as central to human consciousness without history. Historians can, with greater specificity, zero in on the places of doubt around which scientific investigation pivots.

Incorporating emotion into the study of history has wide implications for history in general (as well as other humanities and social sciences). It allows us to more accurately and precisely show how social, political, and religious entities take shape as emotional structures rather than normative ones. This allows me to additionally show how—and this is my primary case study—the “well-nigh perfect oneness” between two men who served in the American Civil War (1861-1865) was representative of the more general idea of a national union (and continues to be in how we organize ourselves today) for the very fact that their “relations … were of peculiar and rarest intimacy.”

It is the story of Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp, both members of a Connecticut regiment on the Northern side of the war. My archive consists of close to two thousand pages of unpublished letters, hundreds of places, and a smattering of material objects, photographs, and drawings. Theirs will be the first historical account of a same-sex couple in the war. By demonstrating the sense-making processes of feeling and emotion through them, and focusing on how those feelings and emotions mattered in their world, especially in terms of their Christianity and the national union over which the war was fought, I will also show the continued need to foreground the absolute centrality of kinship relationships and sexualization to history more broadly. This will simultaneously advance the field of history of sexuality by providing a method of accessing individual’s desires beyond ideas of “sexuality.” For all of sexuality is emotionality.  

General topics of interest include: